Measuring ROI in Social Media marketing

Time is money…

When it comes down to it, time is money. So is time invested in Social Media marketing (SMM).

You should have defined goals for your SMM. If you haven’t, then set some now. These can be as simple as engaging more directly with customers to more complicated goals like building brand recognition.

The final goal for it all should be selling more widgets!

Metrics

Once you have set your goals, you need to identify the metrics you will use to measure success, called KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) in the business.

Each of your goals will probably need different KPI’s. Once you have identified your KPIs, baseline them. Where are they now? Where do you want them to be?

Qualitative Goals

Identifying qualitative goals is just fancy-talk for asking what you want SMM to do for you. These could be:

• Driving more traffic to your website
• Building your reputation as an expert in your industry
• Keeping your company at the top of mind with your customers

There are a million qualitative goals you can set but most of them will revolve around acquiring new customers/revenue and retaining current customers & revenue.

We entrepreneurs are always in such a hurry. Don’t try to measure everything at once, start with one or two goals and set a reasonable time to achieve them. Once you have set your qualitative goals, you can start identifying your quantitative goals.

Quantitative Goals

You know loyal customers are the best customers. You set a goal with your SMM to improve customer engagement to enhance that loyalty. Your quantitative goals could include:

Facebook
Number of likes
Number of comments per day/week/moth
Number of discussions started by fans

Twitter
Number of followers
Number of retweets

Blogging
Number of subscribers
Number of comments
Number of links to posts

You’re lucky; it’s all on the web!

The great thing about web-based marketing is that most of the information you need to learn, improve and measure your SMM is out there on the internet.